BBC phone-in contests return - with new rules

BBC phone-in contests return - with new rules

Thursday 22 November 2007 02.26 EST
First published on Thursday 22 November 2007 02.26 EST

The BBC will reintroduce some of its phone-in competitions before Christmas, with Goal of the Month on Match of the Day and Popmaster on Ken Bruce's Radio 2 show expected to be among the first to return.

All BBC phone-in competitions were suspended in July after high-profile incidents of viewer deception. At the time, the BBC revealed that six shows, including Children In Need, Comic Relief and Sport Relief, were under investigation and the director general, Mark Thompson, said new guidelines on phone-ins must be drawn up.

Yesterday, as Thompson unveiled a corporation-wide code on competitions, a BBC spokesman said that as well as Match of the Day and Popmaster, it "hoped and expected" that a small number of other phone-ins would return soon, with others likely to return in the new year.

It is not clear if all of the suspended competitions will eventually return; there are indications some smaller competitions will be dropped.

The guidelines are the BBC's first code of conduct for competitions and voting on every television and radio programme, and online. Winners must be genuine "and never invented, pre-chosen or planted by the production team" and no one should ever be asked to pose as a contestant or winner. Every entrant should have a fair chance of winning.

If things go wrong with running a competition or vote, the BBC "will not cover it up or falsify the outcome", according to the code. A mandatory editorial training programme for 17,000 staff, Safeguarding Trust, is also now under way.

Thompson said: "Trust is the BBC's most important value and we must never do anything that may undermine that trust ... Audiences enjoy interacting with BBC programmes and output. It's important that they can do so with confidence at all times."